Esquire First Look: Apple TV’s Sadistic Thriller Nocturne

Apple TV8 min readThe world is full of hideous violence and unfathomable cruelty, but there’s reassurance in the belief that once we identify the perpetrators they can be captured, convicted, and stopped. Nocturne is the rare crime thriller that offers no such comfort.The new Apple TV series, debuting October 30, is a sinister reversal of the cat-and-mouse genre. As it begins, the authorities already have their man. Stephen Graham’s character Jurek Walter was apprehended for a series of brutal kidnappings and murders and is locked within an isolated box deep underground inside a prison psych ward. But somehow the killings and disappearances that were once his hallmark have continued unabated.Liev Schreiber plays Jonah Lynn, a retired homicide cop who once helped put Jurek away, and Zazie Beetz is Saga Bauer, an FBI agent who is Lynn’s surrogate daughter. Her late father was once his partner, and they each have a deeply personal, and perhaps professionally disqualifying, interest in tying up the case. They also could both be vulnerable to Jurek’s vengeance, so the mission of Nocturne comes into focus: Saga will go undercover as a patient in the prison, and Jonah will work on the outside to unravel the mystery of how Jurek is communicating with whoever is out there still fulfilling his bidding.Apple TVLiev Schreiber as investigator Jonah Lynn.As Esquire delved into the making of Nocturne for this exclusive first look, it became clear that what sets it apart from other serial-killer stories is also what makes it psychologically unsettling. Jurek’s weapon of choice is not a knife, an ax, or a gun. It’s hopelessness. “For him, the best way to be able to [attack] is to make somebody take their own life,” says Graham. “He gets into your head and manipulates the situation until you can’t take it no more.”Graham is familiar with harrowing darkness, especially after his acting and writing Emmy wins for Netflix’s Adolescence, about a young boy accused of a baffling violent crime. That series was about a vulnerable and disturbed child who becomes warped by toxic influences, with Graham as his heartsick father grappling with the fallout. In Nocturne, Graham is the toxic influence.This is not a killer who froths at the mouth, however. Graham’s performance as Jurek is surprisingly soft-spoken. He whispers for help, weaponizes pity, and wheedles his way into the heads of his victims by exploiting the humanity that he himself lacks. “He’s very much a chameleon,” says Graham, who adds that even he isn’t certain what’s at the core of this malevolent manipulator. “You never get to experience, truly, who he is, because this is how he survived. How he copes is by learning. He picks up people’s behaviors and watches how they conduct themselves. He then plays each situation.”This is what makes Jurek such a formidable opponent. They’ve already caught him. They’ve ostensibly won. And yet his streak of violence and kidnappings continues, and the investigators are somehow more in danger than anyone. “It’s a great sucker punch,” says Schreiber.Schreiber got into the headspace of Jonah Lynn by spending time with real-life homicide detectives. “There is a sense that they’re on their own with each other,” the actor explains. “They see the worst of the world every day. The trauma of that can kind of lead you to think that you and your partners are the only people who know the truth, and that leads you down some dark roads.”Apple TVPoorna Jagannathan as Agent Quinn alongside Liev Schreiber’s Jonah Lynn, interviewing Stephen Graham’s Jurek Walter.Nocturne’s creative team has a long history of exploring the dark side of human nature. The series is inspired by the 2012 novel The Sandman by Lars Kepler, the pen name for the Swedish husband-and-wife writing duo Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, and it was adapted for television by series creator Rowan Joffe, best known for 2010 thriller The American and 2007’s 28 Weeks Later.Joffe moved the Scandinavian setting of the novel to western Pennsylvania, and Nocturne actually shot on location in the woods and small towns surrounding Pittsburgh. After meeting with detectives and a prosecutor in the area, Joffe says the world of the show “began to manifest itself perfectly because of the dominance of the forest in Pennsylvania, which is the oldest and largest forest in the U.S.,” he says. “The forest is a character in the story and is the domain, or kingdom, of our serial killer.”There was also a beauty to the region that he felt contrasted the story’s bleaker themes. “Those small towns gave us a wonderful sense of Edward Hopper’s America, an America that still had some kind of innocence to it that wasn’t all gritty realism and smokestacks,” Joffe says. “A lot of those villages and towns still have a tremendous bucolic charm and a heartfelt communal connection to them. That gave us the chance to have a story where the darkness is balanced by light and the fear is balanced by faith and love. And that makes the show engaging and gives it a heart rather than making it just terrifying, which it indeed can be.”John Hlavin (The Shooter, The Shield) oversaw it all as showrunner, and the intense tone was set by director and executive producer Tim Van Patten, a veteran of The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, and Boardwalk Empire. Graham costarred as Al Capone on that last series, and his history with Van Patten is what brought him into Nocturne.While there are clear good guys and bad guys on the show, Hlavin says the appeal of it is that everyone, regardless of the side they’re on, is keeping secrets and wearing masks. If Jurek Walter has a superpower, it’s seeing the truth beneath—which is how he aligns with one of his accomplices, a prison nurse named Karl, played by Rory Culkin.Apple TVStephen Graham watches from Jurek Walter’s cell as prison nurse Karl Anders (Rory Culkin) walks away.“The narcissism of that person identifies in you exactly what you need and then serves it up to you,” says Hlavin. “That’s what Jurek does to Rory’s Karl. He’s like, ‘Oh, I recognize instantly that you need a father figure, you need an older brother, you need…’ ”...a lover? Hlavin smiles. “I was going to say: ‘You need a very masculine presence to wrap his arms around your feminine presence.’ ” This wasn’t overt in the script, but Graham was determined to play up the intimate connection as they performed it. “As soon as we’d finished the read-through, we were talking and going through scenes,” Graham recalls. “I said to Rory straightaway, I leaned across and went, ‘I’m going to make you fall in love with me.’ And he was like, ‘...What?’ ”Jurek’s manipulation of the investigators from afar required a different tactic. “Now, that’s not going to work with Jonah, you know what I mean?” Hlavin says. “So then you shift to, ‘Oh, Jonah, I know what you need. You need a puzzle. So I’m going to give you a puzzle.’ ”The wild card in their game is Beetz’s Saga, who is largely unknown to Jurek and tries to get close to him by entering the prison facility under the guise of a volatile and mentally unbalanced fellow inmate. “The challenge was the emotional experience of coming so close to your personal triggers and wounds,” Beetz says. “How far are you willing to go to touch the fire? For whatever reason, I think a lot of the show ends up being about whether you can consider yourself to be a good person.”Apple TVZazie Beetz as Saga Bauer, undercover in a detention facility for the criminally insane in Nocturne.She’s willing to violate norms and procedures of undercover work to get the intel she needs on Jurek, but all of that also puts her at high risk from a lot of different directions. “It is kind of an emotional risk, a case that is too close to home for her, in legal terms,” Beetz says. “She’s not a good candidate for this case, but she’s the best one available at the time and able to insert herself. She goes in with a lot of anger. There’s the point of saving a [missing] girl, but I think it’s really tied to her own wounds. She wants to meet and deal with the person that she thinks is responsible for those things.”For Saga’s performance to work, she can’t simply take on a fake name and pretend to be an inmate. Jurek would see through that. Instead, she has to fully commit, which means indulging the brutal mannerisms that would have placed someone in that prison ward. Soon the mask she’s wearing begins to eat into her own psyche in unexpected ways. “Both of the characters think they’re really smart and that they can both potentially outsmart the other,” Beetz says of Saga and Jurek. “And I think both fall prey to their own egos.”All three lead performers put some of their own egos aside to depict their Nocturne characters. Beetz is harried and wild-eyed as her prison alter ego, while Graham’s Jurek is clean-shaven and buzz-cut, trapped in his cell for much of the series. Schreiber remains on the outside but also looks like someone who has been exposed to the elements for maybe too long.“The look was just: He looks like a ragged version of me,” Schreiber says. “As you’ll find out over the course of the thing, he’s been through a lot of shit in the past three years and a lot of isolation. And the mustache was just something that a lot of the [homicide] guys had. And so I was like, ‘Let me try it.’ Much to the chagrin of my wife.”So Naomi Watts wasn’t into the Tom Selleck thing. “No,” he replies. “No.”Apple TVSchreiber’s Jonah consults with Beetz’s Saga, and fellow investigators Nathan Pollack (Gary Carr) and Poorna Jagannathan’s Agent Quinn.Schreiber initially saw Jonah as the opposite of Jurek: a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. Jonah isn’t hiding his motivation, but he is suppressing his better judgment and giving up on some of the idealism that defined him—particularly when it comes to helping Beetz’s character put herself in danger to get to the bottom of how Jurek is maintaining his influence while locked away.This proved to be a tough notion for the actor to wrap his own head around. “When we first started working, I kind of built my moral center around the idea of protecting this young woman,” Schreiber says. “As the story developed and he was going to let her get as close to Walter as anybody could, it was very hard for me. I had to lean into [Saga’s] talent and her ability. That’s part of why he loves her so much, aside from the fact that she’s his goddaughter. It’s because of how eminently capable she is and how good at her job she is.”You might think a man like Jonah would have firm limits to the risk he would tolerate for someone he loves, but Nocturne is about pushing the boundaries of right and wrong. “As the show progresses, the extent to which he’ll go to make sure that Jurek Walter is apprehended or killed is pretty profound,” Schreiber says.Beetz says Saga is eager to not just meet her father figure’s expectations but also to exceed them. “Especially with her [biological] father having been a difficult person, she wants to prove that she overcame that, and is better than that, and is strong and grew past her personal life circumstances,” the actress says.Apple TVApple TVBill Camp as Chief Ellison and Chrissy Metz as Ida Frost, the mother of two children who went missing because of Jurek Walter.There’s not much for the audience to sympathize with regarding Jurek, but Hlavin says the writing team behind Nocturne debated whether there was any humanity to be found in him. Whether they found any within him will be a mystery for the show to reveal, but Hlavin says he recognized something almost primitive about the character.“He’s almost in a kennel. You know what I mean?” Hlavin says. “We made very specific design choices around what we call the RHU, the restricted housing unit, for a couple of reasons. One, we didn’t want to be unfavorably compared to, say, Silence of the Lambs, which had a very gothic look. We wanted concrete walls around a very thin door. This is a guy that has survived in the wild since he was a child, and now they’ve put him in this place.”As Nocturne gradually reveals, however, he is nowhere near as contained as they first assume.Apple TVStephen Graham on Jurek Walter: “He gets into your head and manipulates the situation until you can’t take it no more.”